I like the points to ponder section! Pondering is one of my favorite pastimes :)
Now, I'm certainly no economist, but I think bitcoin is probably undervalued. The amount of users is still a small sliver of the population and I think that perpetuates the situation. Most people completely misunderstand bitcoin in my experience. I mean, cryptography in general gets pretty heady pretty fast and even some programmers I know don't really get bitcoin from what I can tell. That's not to mention all the average Janes and Joes out there who's only image of bitcoin comes from movies and other media that unfavorably juxtapose it with drug trafficking, scams, and hackers stealing your money. Even people who see through that sort of thing often still think it's actually a pyramid scheme or ponzi scheme. These kinds of things breed bad sentiment, but most of the time it's just a lack of understanding I think. Over time I think more and more people will take the time to understand cryptocurrency, and as that happens the bad sentiment will start to evaporate. I don't know if that will take us to up to $4000, back to $20k, or $∞ as hyperbitcoinization takes hold on USD.
I'm just saying though that if bitcoin goes down to 1/22,000,000 of a dollar and everyone else jumps ship, I'm buy up all of them I can get my digital hands on :)
Also there's the halvening coming up, and nobody can oopsie the money printing (or maliciously manipulate it) if no one is in charge of it and it's all automated. Of course the schedule might not be ideal, but it's ongoing and bitcoin is up a downright wacky amount since 2009, so I'm more optimistic than pessimistic about the supply controls.
Right, and even if people don't fully understand cryptos, they will nevertheless end up adopting them. Just as people started using personal computers and then the internet, without understanding them to any significant degree.
Bitcoin and other cryptos will become "understandable" to the general public, and the public will begin to use them more and more. It's already happening.